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Comment by moconnor | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see why you believe 2 would be true. I expect a strong correlation between the visual appearance of food and its caloric content etc.

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Most restaurants smuggle obscene amounts of butter and sugar into dishes to make them more delicious so you'll come back. It's not unreasonable to assume that every subcomponent of a recipe might have sugar added individually.

In packaged foods, there is a whole science of masking the sugar and fat content to make it more addictive without triggering your inbuilt satiety mechanisms [1]. This is what today's engagement optimisers did for money in the 50/60s.

You could argue that these "innovations" were precisely to subvert the intuition that visual appearance of food (and other natural sensors) can be relied on to assess their nutritional properties.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)#:~:text=T...

> Most restaurants smuggle obscene amounts of butter

God I wish that was true. Butter is far too expensive to do that, so restaurants will use the cheapest alternative (usually soybean oil with butter flavoring) instead.

There is absolutely, unequivocally, 0 chance this can be accurate within any kind of reasonable bounds. I'm guessing you haven't done much calorie tracking if you think this could possibly be true.

I can make two dishes that look identical and have +/- 50% caloric content, easily.

> I expect a strong correlation between the visual appearance of food and its caloric content

This doesn't pass even simple scrutiny. There are so many caloric ingredients that aren't visible in food. You can't tell just by looking whether a rice dish contains half a stick of butter.

Or if it's diet coke or regular coke. Yes, it's drinks, not food, but the same concept applies.

They claim 90% accuracy, whatever that means, but I have my doubts regarding it's usefulness.

How does an app know that this piece of chicken cordon bleu is actually filled with more bacon and cheese than chicken?

Try telling a picture of diet coke from regular coke apart.

This is completely wrong. For example, you can increase the amount of oil or butter in a recipe, doubling or tripling its calorie count, and you would never be able to tell from a picture.

I imagine it just autofills the information and then you can edit it to make it more accurate

You'd have to be kind of stupid to expect it to actually be 100% accurate for all meals

Therefore...

4. I don't need this app.

The point of the app is to figure out the calories of a meal automatically by taking a photo.

Without knowing the amount of sugar, butter, oil, etc. is used in a dish, one cannot know if a dish is worth 250 kilocalories or 750 kilocalories.

If I need to manually fill in details of ingredients and amounts to get to the calories to be have an error margin of less than 100%, then the app is not useful and is at best misleading.

... So if you already know the answer you can correct it? I mean, what possible use is that?

1 tbsp of animal fat has about 900 calories.

1 tbsp of olive oil has 135 calories.

How would the app know which fat the food was cooked in?

That’s not true. They have the same amount of calories roughly. It’s physically impossible for animal fat to have that many calories. Tallow has 900 calories per 100 grams while olive oil has 884. They are almost pure fat and pure fat has 9 calories per gram.

> 1 tbsp of animal fat has about 900 calories.

This is extremely false. Please verify your sources better (and apply a skosh of critical thinking).

> 1 tbsp of olive oil has 135 calories.

This is false too, but at least it's in the right ballpark.

> This is extremely false. Please verify your sources better

Sorry! I was using Cal AI

Ok, that made me laugh.

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